Planet Linux Mint

2015.07.25

Reminder: OEM images are for computer vendors and manufacturers. They allow Linux Mint to be “pre-installed” on a machine which is then used by another person than the one who performed the installation. After an OEM installation, the computer is set in such a way that the next reboot features a small setup screen where the new user/customer has the ability to choose his/her username, password, keyboard layout and locale.

The Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 17.2 were released and users of these editions were able to upgrade from Linux Mint 17 and 17.1. Everything went well and the reception was very good. It was a real pleasure for us to see you discover the improvements we worked on in the last 6 months.

OEM and no-codecs installation images should become available tomorrow.

LMDE 2 Betsy received all the improvements and new packages that were held during the RC phases.

We’re now in the RC phase for the Xfce and KDE editions. So far most of the bugs were either minor or cosmetic. The upgrade paths for these two editions were also successfully tested and will be open to 17 and 17.1 users at around the same time as the stable releases, around the end of the month.

By the beginning of August we should be ready to start developing again. Many ideas were kept for the next development cycle, some commits are already there, pull requests were held, developers are probably eager to see things move again. It’s an exciting phase of the project, where we’ve no idea what the next version will be like, but we’ve got a lot of ideas and resources at our disposal and plenty of time to get ambitious

Many thanks to all the people who donated to us, and to our sponsors for supporting us. A big thank you also to the 10% of users (according to our torrent stats) who take the time to test the RC releases. The feedback you give us during the RC is a huge opportunity for us to improve and Linux Mint often gets significant improvements prior to stable releases (this time around I can’t help but think at how you allowed us to improve EFI support and NVIDIA Prime, so thanks a lot for that). You all help us in very different ways, we don’t often get the chance to communicate back or to acknowledge individual efforts, but we’re very grateful to be helped so much.